The bulk of the following interview with author Harrison Livingstone was conducted during two telephone conversations, one on July 30 1998, the second on August 13. There was also a short follow-up call in late August.

The first interview took place on the eve of the release of long-awaited transcripts of testimony of JFK autopsy doctors to the Assassination Records Review Board. By the time of our second phone interview, Mr. Livingstone had read through much of that material, and it dominated the conversation. It clearly was the most newsworthy subject before us and is the principal focus of what follows.

It would be remiss of me, however, not to note that during preliminary discussions for the interviews, Mr. Livingstone said he wanted to address "stories that fly around about me" within the research community, which he characterized as vicious and untrue.

As he wrote in Killing the Truth, he believes many of the stories originated with earlier generation researchers, who he says take a proprietary view of the JFK case, and have little tolerance for diversity of opinion. "They're not able to have a gentlemanly disagreement the way Martin [Shackelford] and I do, and many others --- we all are still friends. And thank God, because we're able to question each other in a civilized way, and find out that we might have made a mistake somewhere."

Mr. Livingstone says the reason for the discord is that the Kennedy assassination case has become so highly politicized. "People like me that are coming out with an initially unpopular position --- and that is that the official evidence is all fake --- are going to be the subject of an attack, if this person is at all public."

In any case, most of this interview comes from our August 13 conversation. Mr. Livingstone had just completed reviewing the material released by the Board on July 31, and writing a lengthy article on it for inclusion in the soon-to-be-republished High Treason. "This is a legal case that I'm presenting," he said of the article. "It's sufficient evidence for Congressman O'Neill --- who was at the autopsy, as one of the FBI men --- and other people [who] might want to proceed now with a legal proceeding..."

Fair Play: I wanted to ask you about the Review Board, and what your view of them is, and if you think it's an honest panel.

Harrison Livingstone: (Laughs) We'll know tomorrow [July 31], and we'll know in September when their Report comes out. I don't trust them at all, and of course am the one who actually wrote the so-called "Nurko" letter. Mike Nurko, who's a good friend of mine ... he and I are pretty tight, we talked this week. The point of that letter was to put the Board on guard that there would not be another coverup. Now I find that Jeremy Gunn resigned last Friday, and it's tomorrow, a week later, that we're going to get his interviews with the autopsy personnel. I find the fact that he's left is very frightening, because he's not going to be there to answer for what he's done...

None of them [the Board members] can really be too much above political influence. It's not really safe for them to come out and say, "Well yeah, we've got evidence here of a conspiracy." After all, they have been conducting a secret investigation and stretching their mandate quite a bit, to talk with these doctors. I mean, we'll all be glad they did, and the case may come flying apart tomorrow...

Fair Play: You mention the "Nurko letter" --- I don't know what that is.

Harrison Livingstone: Okay. At the last conference at Fredonia---

Fair Play: Is that 1996?

Harrison Livingstone: It might have been 1996. [It was --Ed.] But I sort of forced out into the open a public discussion of what the Board was doing in Washington, and I was pretty up-to-date on the fact that they were conducting a medical investigation. But I didn't know how this would turn out, because this --- I was highly suspicious of all this, because I'm suspicious of the Board itself. Not so much the staff, but the Board was composed of conservatives, as far as the Kennedy case goes. And they really, probably, were not interested in finding anything that pointed in the direction of a conspiracy.

So I suggested to the audience that we prepare a letter, sort of threatening the Board that there would be no more coverups in the case, and asking them not to do so, and not to interfere, and if they were going to question the autopsy doctors, and other witnesses, that this be conducted with a high degree of honesty, and that they truly inquire as to whether or not there was any possibility that these autopsy pictures were fake.

So Jeff Sherwood, who was sitting in the audience, he --- who lives in Southern California --- he wrote down, or he put onto a computer disk, the rough draft of a letter that I then composed while I was sitting there in the proceedings. And he typed it in, and then several people made suggestions, and edited it. We passed it around after we left Fredonia, faxed it around the country, and came up with a final copy, which we decided that Michael Nurko would --- who's a New York businessman and a very close friend of mine --- that he would issue the letter to the Board under his signature. And the reason at the time was that I was in such a, I'd had so much slander, and so many other problems, that tended to undermine whatever authority I might have, even though my books were best sellers, and this kind of thing --- it would be better if this letter looked like it was a general letter and a whole lot of people signed it.

Well, a whole lot of people did sign it, who had been at Fredonia, and other people who hadn't been at Fredonia, they signed it. So it then went to the Board as a sort of overall threat, understated threat, asking them to not cover up the case one more time.

FaIr Play: The last time we talked, was just before the Board's last release of documents. I was wondering if anything particularly significant came out of that?

Harrison Livingstone: This is the biggest story of the century. I think that the case is definitely broken, but you have to piece it together from bits of information that they obtained from each person. And, they found a lot of new people that they spoke with ... and so, they released about, I guess around 1500 pages of their new interviews --- for the most part, with people we know about like Dr. Humes and Boswell, and so on. And then, among those eight interviews were a couple of new ones, like the woman who developed the film at Anacostia Naval Station, at the photographic center. And then they had a sort of, short reports, many many more people that most of us never heard of, you know, or people that we knew their names were in the evidence, but there wasn't much information.

But it was entirely focused, for the most part, those particular reports, on the question of whether or not these photographs and x-rays are real. Which I think I'm safe to say is a result of the several books that I wrote. So they were trying to dig into this. And, from what I saw, and I've now prepared an article in the book that's going to press shortly, High Treason --- I wrote a 70, 65-page article which has about 260 notes in it, so that the reader will be able to find in these documents, if they have access to them, what I'm talking about.

But this was a major advance in the case. It's major news, it's stunning, it's --- I think essentially the case is broken. If a legal proceeding of some kind now follows, I think that, you know, such a legal proceeding would be able to take the case farther, in terms of getting more information than the Board could have got, because the Board was severely limited by the JFK Act and as it was, they had to stretch their mandate, possibly, to ask the questions they were asking, in bringing in all these witnesses, and essentially conducting a secret investigation that the public didn't know about, and so on.

I was particularly moved by the depostitions of the two FBI men, [James W.] Sibert and [Francis X.] O'Neill, who I thought were possibly the most credible and most important witnesses at this point. And what's interesting is the anger that both of these men have for Arlen Specter, and the ridicule for the single bullet theory. And at this point all of these witnesses seem to have been reading our books.

Fair Play: So, these are new interviews that they've done with the Board?

Harrison Livingstone: Absolutely. But there's a lot more information in them, because this time the interviewers from the Board were a lot better prepared than they were at the House of Representatives, and in the past. The problem is that many more years have passed, 35 years, and people's memories are in trouble, you know, their --- there's a lot of things they can't remember, and so on. So it's hard to interpret what we're hearing. Very difficult. But if you marshal the facts that we did get, the Board got, you can weigh this evidence, and you can see for yourself. And that's essentially what the Board did.

There wasn't any report --- there was a five page handout that they gave with this material, and I was the first one to get it, and the first one to really be able to do anything significant with it. And some people I know still didn't have it a couple of days ago, you know, it was being shipped from Washington. And it's a huge --- it's a full box, a cardboard box, of stuff, probably three thousand five hundred pages. Among them, the Board started from Day One, they copied the testimony of the Parkland doctors to Arlen Specter and so on, and gave this out. And of course, various members of the media and the press came in to get this stuff. And so you have a big clue there, because the Board was trying to re-educate both researchers and the media in the main issues of what the head looked like, the wounds, what did they look like, and so on --- and then build a case for questioning the autopsy pictures, because they simply don't show the hole that was in the back of the head, and the entry hole is not visible. And the doctors are very very insistent that that entry hole didn't move up to the cowlick area, that it should be right near the hairline, where they placed it in the autopsy report.

And in the case of O'Neill and Sibert, they're very angry, in my opinion, and it's important because O'Neill is a congressman, a United States Congressman, and here he was, the FBI man at the autopsy. Although I believe J. Edgar Hoover was privy to the whole plot, and was working with Lyndon Johnson and the people behind them to pull this off, I don't believe the FBI, the lower eschelons, at least outside of Dallas, I don't think they were used in anything like this. They were free to investigate as best they could. It ultimately didn't matter too much what they might have found in their investigation, because Hoover was able to cut it off at the top.

And so here you have two men who I think were particularly well-qualified as criminal investigators. And if you look at the backgrounds of Sibert and O'Neill, they weren't a couple of rubes in a local FBI office in College Park. They were very experienced men, and certainly in a far different ballgame than the doctors themselves, who as creatures of the military are easily intimidated and easily controlled. And that's the problem that we've had all along, that the military controlled the facts and the autopsy.

So it's clear to me now, reading all this new material --- and I read everything that was there before --- that the doctors lied in their autopsy report, and they lied to the Warren Commission. And there's much more, I believe, that they know that they're still not saying. And a further legal proceeding, which could conceivably flow out of this after my article is published, I think would clarify better what happened in the Kennedy case if it can extract more of the real story from these doctors. And I think there's something very, very big that's being hidden, that has to do with several more shots in the President's body, and so on. I think it's rather clear from the evidence that he might have been getting hit from all directions, during that shooting.

Fair Play: When you say the doctors lied, you're referring specifically to Humes and Boswell, and Finck, I presume?

Harrison Livingstone: Yeah.

Fair Play: The autopsy doctors, obviously.

Harrison Livingstone: Or they're just witholding more information. But they certainly lied in the autopsy report, insofar as they put a presumption in there of a bullet transiting the body, coming out the throat area, when they had no information on this. And you're going to read in the transcripts of Sibert and O'Neill a rage over that issue. Because they also wrote an autopsy report, which clearly showed that this didn't happen, that there was no way that a bullet passed through there.

Fair Play: And what happened to their report?

Harrison Livingstone: Well, we have it. That was the FBI, the Sibert and O'Neill report that was eventually dug out years ago. And it reports---

Fair Play: Oh, that's the same one that, that---

Harrison Livingstone: Yeah. And it reports what they saw and heard. And that's the one with "surgery to the head area," and all that. And they tried to explain, the Board did try to get all this stuff clarified. What did it mean? A missile was recovered? You know, and so on. Well, he says that that was the Navy's terminology --- it wasn't the FBI's terminology, that any fragment that's airborne is a missile. Or any piece. But that isn't the way the FBI would have written it. He said the FBI didn't write the receipt. They just signed it. And so on, but you'll read about this in my article, which may not be perfectly comprehensive --- I'm still reading a few documents, even this morning, and found a couple of little points that should have been in the article, to make it a little rounder ... but I think that I've now been able to carry this case much farther, thanks to what the Board did. And I think that everyone else will be able to do it too, when they get this stuff, if they understand it, what it means.

First of all you've got to be able to be old enough, and have the experience to be able to weigh evidence. Whether or not I've done it better than anyone else could have done it, I have no idea. But I have a suspicion that it's going to be quite difficult for the media or the public to have any idea what this means, without somebody to pick out all this stuff that is valid in terms of taking this case farther.

That brings up the whole issue of value judgments. About what's being said. That's another problem. Selectivity.

Fair Play: So this will be an appendix [to High Treason], or somehow added on to the---

Harrison Livingstone: Yes, an appendix. A quite large appendix, now, because I've sent --- some of the documents I'm reprinting, but it's only a handful. And some photographs, the bullet that was in the National Archives that was found, apparently, in Kennedy's body, and we've seen this --- I don't know if anybody's seen this. I know some researchers know about it.

The National Archives also gave me recent photographs that they took of the windshield. They won't let us see it. Then the problem becomes to compare this with the old photographs that were taken at the time of the murder, before they removed it from the car. The windshield is in a box, and they didn't even take it out of the box. They just stood it up somewhat and photographed it, and took closeups of what looks like a small hole through the windshield. But you can't see the beveling, I don't think. And you have to really examine the prints, and some experts that know more than I would have to be able to do that.

Fair Play: You told the Board a couple of years ago, I think '94, that, this is a quote, "the medical evidence in this case is a fraud and a lie," and that, again quoting, "all the physical evidence in this case was faked." Do you think the Board, judging from what you've seen in the last couple of weeks, has the Board taken that notion seriously?

Harrison Livingstone: Oh, yeah. The whole thing centers on that issue. The whole focus of what they did --- is, I mean, what you quoted me as saying, I was saying basically what my work is all about. What I felt that this case was all about. I think everything in it --- I think Jerry Rose was absolutely on the same track with me, except that he was focused on Oswald, and handwriting, and many other issues of faked evidence. And I was focused on medical evidence. But Jerry was a lone voice in the wind for a long time. I mean, he basically understood what had happened, and how this case was faked. But really other than us, there was almost nobody that really dared question the official evidence in the case to this extent. And what the Board did after they --- I know they read every word of my books. In fact my name comes up in almost every single interview, or the depositions that we have. I think in Humes it comes up three times. And even the witnesses are reading my stuff. Which leads to another question, of whether or not I'm now influencing, or the books in the JFK case are in any way influencing, the responses of the witnesses. So that's a whole new problem at this point.

But insofar as they are responding to specific questions that go to either the authenticity, or lack of it, of the evidence, or specific questions that are trying to clarify some of the many conflicts that we've all been pointing out --- in other words, the weight of the brain, the weight of the liver --- they've gone a lot into this stuff that I've bitched and moaned and groaned about in my books, along with some other people.

And I think it's pretty extraordinary what they have accomplished with the very limited mandate that the Board had. And I think --- I was pretty stunned when I started reading this stuff. You've probably heard already that Spencer, the Navy Corpswoman at --- did you hear any of this?

Fair Play: I don't think so. I've been kind of out of touch.

Harrison Livingstone: Well that was in George Lardner's piece which was obtainable on the Internet. He wrote in the Washington Post on Sunday, after that release --- it was probably the second of August --- he said that there was a woman at the autopsy, or the Navy photoprocessing center, who processed an entirely different set of autopsy pictures than the ones that we now have in the official evidence. She was shown each autopsy picture. Well the Board --- why would they be showing her these pictures if they weren't trying to find out if this stuff was real or false? --- and she absolutely denounced every picture that we now have in the Archives.

Fair Play: Wow!

Harrison Livingstone: And then there are many other descriptions, from everybody from Robert Knudsen, who was the White House photographer, who just happened to be this woman's boss --- he described pictures that have probes stuck all the way through the body, all the way through the torso, the probes that were stuck through the hole at the base of the neck --- I mean the one description, I don't know if it's him, is from the base of the, or from the hairline entry hole that is in the autopsy report --- down through the hole in the neck. See? That's why the Clark Panel and these other stooges moved the entry hole up to the cowlick area, in order to have it come out of the head somewhere. Because you can't have a downward trajectory from that window hitting him near the hairline and coming out of the head somewhere. It doesn't work.

And so according to these witnesses, they stuck a probe all the way through and it came out through the throat, through the tracheotomy. So all these things that are being hidden --- these are the more colossal lies that are in the autopsy report. And then they did reproduce the CBS memorandum, which I've had for a long time, from Bob Richter, where he describes one of their people named Snyder talking with Humes, and they're in the same church in Washington, and Humes is telling him that there was a photograph of a probe stuck all the way through the body, and he says that the FBI men were not even in the room, they were kept in the anteroom right next to it --- which I don't believe, but he's got to say that because he had so much to cover up for at the time.

But they were just following orders, I assume, unless a lot of people piled on the bandwagon as soon as Kennedy was dead, and they were all glad, you know. But there is an element in the military, a right-wing element, that they would have done exactly that.

So the case is now on a whole new level. And the next step is for a lot of people to begin thinking about the miliary mind, and thinking about bureaucrats, and the bureaucratic phenomenon, and how people normally lie, and normally make up stuff, or normally have to cover their ass for every mistake they made --- leads to many more lies. It's like Watergate. That's really the phenomonon we're dealing with, on one level, in this case. But then the deeper level may have been a far larger lie there, by everybody concerned with that autopsy. And these people were thoroughly brainwashed, were thoroughly hypno-programmed or whatever. And we still don't have, remotely, the real story.

But thanks to the Board we have an awful lot more. Because I think it's now very conclusive when you assemble all the bits and pieces that you'll find in very many of these new interviews that add up to a picture of deliberately tampered record --- in the case --- numerous photographs are missing, that they took. Numerous x-rays are missing. There were many pictures or x-rays that showed entirely different scenes. People described two different views, just as I saw, and Steve Barber and I saw, and other people, at Robert Groden's house --- two different autopsy pictures of the right profile of the head that showed exactly opposite things. Exactly opposite pictures of the back of the head. People described to the Board photographs that did in fact show scalp and bone missing in the very back of the head. And when it was lying on a pillow --- if you remember in High Treason, it's interesting that all this is going to be published in High Treason, because that book quoted the doctors in Dallas saying when the head was lying on a pillow, you couldn't see a hole in the head. And then it goes right through to Tom Robinson, who put the hole back together at the embalming, and he said, "Well, we still couldn't close up" --- you could close up everything on the skull with the flap of scalp, except the back of the head. There wasn't any scalp there. He said that it didn't matter, because his head was on a pillow. So that was the answer. It was right all along. And the first one that made it clear to me was the woman in Dallas who was the anesthesiologist who was present, and that's how she described it. Because she never did see the hole in Kennedy's head. She was standing right over the top of his face, along with Dr. Jenkins. See? Looking down at him. And she wasn't there when they lifted up the body. And Dr. Clark and others demonstrated the hole in the head. It was done two or three times.

Now this is the first phase. In September there's going to be a report from the Board. And presumably they are going to comment, to some extent, on all of this.

Fair Play: I want to ask you something that I asked you last time, and maybe see what kind of answer I'll get now that you've seen all this stuff in the last couple weeks. I wonder what your view of the Board is, and if you think it's an honest panel?

Harrison Livingstone: Well, this has got nothing to do with the panel --- this was done by the staff. Jeremy Gunn, especially Douglas Horn, and people that dug out all these witnesses and got them by the throat and got some answers. Now whether or not they had the help from the panel, which I really haven't had a lot of faith in --- and I agree with Jim DiEugenio's feelings about that analysis that he published about some of these Board members. But I'm not going to say anything against them, because we just got a huge break in the Kennedy case because of them. But the work was done by the staff. It was their brilliance, and their tenacity, that got a lot more information than the House of Representatives got. Fortunately, enough people were still alive.

The big question in the House interviews with Robet Knudsen was, they didn't bother to ask him, "Were you in the autopsy room? Did you take photographs of the President?" --- they didn't ask him that. Turns out he told many people he was one of the photographers, and he had the pictures. He also had entirely different pictures than we, or a certain number of them, than we have today.

Now a lot of people will go in a darkroom, and they will play with photographs, and they will alter them, and mess with them. As I think Roscoe White did as a police photographer with the backyard photos. I think he was probably the one who faked it. And all that stink we heard about Roscoe White down in Dallas was to misdirect, you know, with Mandarin and assassins on the knoll, and him being one of the shooters and all that --- was to distract attention away from the fact that he was the police photographer. And that he had these pictures. And that he was probably the one that faked the backyard pictures.

Fair Play: I had not heard that. Are you basing that on documentation of any kind? Or is this just a feeling that you have?

Harrison Livingstone: Well, it's my hunch that he's the one who did it. And, I'm very far from it right now, so I don't want to discuss it right now. I'd have to go back and review an awful lot of material. But I had every reason to believe, at the time, that he was the one that did it.

Fair Play: I wonder what your thoughts are --- and I guess it's been about a month or so since this new version of the Zapruder film has been released on video --- this Image of an Assassination. I wonder if you've seen it, and---

Harrison Livingstone: Well, I just got it yesterday. And I didn't buy it --- somebody brought it over. And there's nothing new for me, because what's new about it, as far as the public goes, is it shows the sprocket hole information. And that's something we've been studying intensely at the archives for years and years and years. I can think of twenty years, at least, whenever it was that they got it up there on the slides, and you can flip them through the viewers that they have there, and study that closely with pretty damned good clarity. And I'm sure that's a hell of a lot better than the film, which is on videotape. I have, myself and my team, have been intensely analyzing that whole inner sprocket area. Plus I've been looking at the film strips in the laboratories there. Every available copy of the film, since the second of January I guess, when we went up there --- and now I'm supposed to be the first person to see the original film, but I am bringing in my team to look at it with me. And since the Board, you know, seized it for the government, and it's supposed to be this month ... but I'm really, basically, not interested in --- these people are trying to make money from the film, as they always have.

And the problem is, they're ignoring the clear-cut evidence, as far as I'm concerned, that this is a faked film. The scenes are different than what's in the Nix film. The, some of the events in the Zapruder film are clearly, uh ... animated, I guess is a good word for it. It's stuff that's been made up on the film. And so on. And we know from the FBI reconstruction of the murder that the head shot did not happen opposite Zapruder at all. It happened down by the bridge. And the suspicion that people always had, that the mist and everything in the air wasn't right, that it seemed to be a combination of two shots to the head --- that's probably very accurate, because they compressed two different head shots into that one that now exists in the film.

So I don't --- as far as this new release, it's really basically a means of extorting many millions of dollars, if they can get it, from the government, which offered them about 250 or 300 thousand dollars for the film when they took it last March. I think it was in March. And the Zapruders are trying to get, it's either thirteen or eighteen million dollars for it. So to get the film out like this is a last ditch attempt to get a lot more money for it. And nobody's paying any attention to us, who are claiming, and this has now become a red-hot issue, are claiming that the film is phony. So that's my take on all this --- it's just a means of extorting from the taxpayer.

Fair Play: One of the first times we talked, you talked a little bit about the current Mac Wallace story. You wrote some about Wallace in Killing the Truth, although in that, your sources were placing him on the grassy knoll, or in that area, whereas the latest, as you know, identifies a previously unidentified sixth floor print as being Mac Wallace's. And I wonder what your thoughts are on that?

Harrison Livingstone: I don't think I had him up there as a shooter. But I did understand that Mac Wallace probably ran the shooting teams. And that he did work for Johnson, and also directly for some of the oil people, some of the wealthy people. He worked for the company, let's see, he worked for the company that Harold Byrd, who owned the Texas building, School Book Depository building, he worked for that man's company. And you know they were all in a tight little circle of people.

As for him being on the sixth floor, it's preposterous, because there wasn't any shooter up there. The whole thing was staged. As for his print being up there, it might very well be, because somebody planted the evidence up there. But I don't think that anybody was shooting from that window. Everybody would have fled from that building. And certainly all the people standing on the steps would have walked back in there if a man had been up in that window firing. They would have run like holy hell to get out of there, because that's a very noisy rifle, and it would have been tremendously amplified by the interior of that sixth floor, which is a large space. So, you know, I just think it's preposterous.

I have more data, I have really all the articles that dealt with Mac Wallace and the Henry Marshall case and all that, and the guys that wrote that book, the Man on the Sixth Floor, or whatever [The Men on the Sixth Floor] did not have all that material. They had some of it. And they --- I really feel that thing was a deliberate hoax to get people misdirected one more time --- every time somebody got close to something, like in the Roscoe White, or this or that, they would come up with this bullshit --- nobody recruited an Indian at a funeral of Sam Rayburn to be involved in an assassination some time later. It wouldn't have worked that way. You know? Everybody --- my sources in Dallas were high level, and the people that were involved in the murder all knew each other, and it was a tight little circle, and every one of them was capable of killing somebody. And after all, they weren't too far from the Old West in those days, and killing people was a sport. And if you didn't shoot bullets at their feet to make 'em dance, you certainly didn't mind putting a bullet through somebody who gave you trouble, as long as you could get away with it, and control the judge, and so on.

But that's my take on it. I think that the LaFontaines are frauds. I don't believe for a minute that they had Oswald in a cell with anybody else, or even near anybody else --- that's the last thing they would have done. The Dallas cops, whatever they may be --- they're not that stupid. So, you just have to really greatly mistrust anything that emanates from somebody with a Texas accent. But on the other hand, I did have some very good sources, and they were Texans. And there are honest people down there. There are Texas liberals. Like Penn Jones. And they're the best people in the world, as far as I'm concerned.

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